Really interesting, shocking quote from the original article, but the Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News, IMO. The original Wired piece is great, though.
Allowed by whom?
Cato only exists because advocating private ownership of profit turns out to be profitable
And this is somehow not simplistic?
There's a difference between simple and simplistic. Simplistic is pretending the only incentive force at work in a national scale institution is the profit incentive.
Simple is acknowledging that a small institution with the mission statement to advocate for profit incentive as the singular organizing principle of our economy probably believes in its mission statement and operates for the purpose of the private profit of its owners.
I've seen a few _interesting_ notes from CATO, but nothing I would call subtle or anything but free market fundamentalism. They tend to pick up every single news story and view it through a free market, shrink govt, give an individual the profit lens. Which is why they can only write a short, generic paragraph of comment on an interesting story about Khan Academy. OP should have been a link to Wired.
As if Hacker News is somehow more qualified on economic issues than Cato, which has 10 Nobel Laureates?
F. A. Hayek
Milton Friedman
James M. Buchanan
Robert Mundell
Edward C. Prescott
Douglass C. North
Vernon L. Smith
Gary S. Becker
Ronald Coase
Thomas C. Schelling
I was not impeaching the intellectual output of the Nobel laureates associated with the Cato institute, but I do have to note here that none of them wrote this blog post, nor is there any indication that any of them reviewed it. I could further debate your name-dropping, but I've wasted enough key-strokes on this as is.
Sorry, but you dismiss Cato because of its "free-market spin" and then call its main thesis "questionable", when 10 Nobel Laureates, who probably know far more than us on economic issues, are associated with Cato. I'd also note that Paul Krugman, Delong, and Sachs -- all very prominent Democratic supporters -- are very pro free market as indicated on the links you'll find on their Wikipedia pages.
These are all primarily political and non-technical issues that affect our industry just as the Khan Academy affects our ability to learn in the politicized education industry.